So, you want to do an electronics project on the cheap, with minimal tooling. “Do I really need to buy a pair of wire strippers?” Of course not, you can use alternate tools to achieve the same thing. But can you really get the same quality and speed that you can with a dedicated wire stripper tool? Under some circumstances, yes.
I’ll focus on a very specific use case that is pertinent to me: stripping old 6P4C telephone “patch cable” wires. These particular wires are stranded copper wires, as they are meant to be able to bend and flex without breaking. I chose these wires specifically because I wanted to recycle and reuse unused old equipment as much as possible for my electronics projects, of which these were a candidate. However, there is something specific about these wires that makes them perhaps a little bit different from your typical electronics project stranded wires: the strands are not twisted together. This actually creates a particular problem that makes them more difficult to strip using a conventional wire stripping technique: after you have cut the insulation and are pulling off the bit of insulation, the insulation tends to stick to some or all of the individual strands of wire. Thus, when you pull the insulation off, you end up pulling large parts, or even entire strands, out of the remainder of the wire’s insulation. So, how do you mitigate this problem? As it turns out, the easiest methods to mitigate this problem come naturally when you are using a pair of scissors to strip the wire.
So, let’s outline the most important steps of the scissors wire stripping technique. The first important part of the technique is practice. You’re going end up getting it wrong many times before you can get it right consistently. With that mention out of the way, here are the steps.
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Get your pair of scissors and wire ready. I recommend using a short pair of school scissors that are somewhat dull for better ease of fine control.
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Take your pair of scissors and very gently and slowly clasp down on the wire with the scissors blades. The idea of this step is a rather subtle one. Your goal isn’t to directly cut through the insulation, but rather indirectly cut the insulation by causing the wire to undergo a very sharp bend in angle over a small area.
It’s important that you be really careful at this step, as once part of the wire is cut through, it takes less force to cut through the rest of the wire. If you’re not careful, your scissors blades will slip to a higher velocity and you would have ended up cutting through the whole wire.
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Take a look at the several diagrams I’ve included here. As your scissors cuts down on the wire, what happens is that the two blades of your scissors contacts the wire at different portions. One blade pushes one piece of the wire up, and the other blade pushes the other piece of the wire down. As you press the blades down further, this causes the angle of that bend to increase. Eventually, you’ll reach a sharp enough bend angle over a small enough area that surely, the half of the wire insulation that traverses the longer edge would have had to stretch so far that it probably got broken right through.
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Once you believe the longer half of the insulation has been cut through, open up the blades of the scissors. You should be able to look at the side of the wire that stretched the longer path and notice that you can see the shiny copper through that edge. That’s how you know you’ve made it through one side of the insulation.
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Now, this last step is the most interesting and important. First, grab the bit of insulation at the end and twist it around one time. Do not twist it around too much or else your entire wire will break. The twist is important so that you can get some of the exposed end of the wire to be twisted together, which will make mounting and soldering into your electronics project easier.
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Now, the last trick is to tightly grip the wire insulation on each side of the partial cut and shear it off at a sharp angle by pulling perpendicular to the wire, not parallel. This technique will minimize the risk of pulling strands of wire out from your untwisted, stranded wire. Look carefully at the diagrams I’ve provided for details. Note that when I was doing this last step, I used the ends of my fingernails to help get a small, tight grip. If you are unable to do this and gripping with your fingers won’t do, you may need to use two pairs of tweezers to get the right grip on the wire for this last step.
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Once you have successfully pulled off the bit of insulation, you should see the shiny exposed copper of the wire is bent off at the same angle you were shearing, but is otherwise intact. You can now bend the exposed copper back to the same angle as the rest of the wire.